Posted on 01/25/2021 3:26:02 PM PST by nickcarraway
Why are they right wing?
The concept of rightwing and leftwing are shorthand descriptions of a person’s relationship to his government. Right wing is an individualist belief system and left wing is a subjugation of the individual to the government.
Another way to describe it is individualism vs statism. All political beliefs are a continuum between those two extremes. On the right, you have anarchy, which is no government. Then you have libertarianism, which is only just enough government to keep us from killing each other. Then you have conservatism which is small and local government. Then you have finally have Republicanism, which is a central conservatism belief system.
On the left, starting with a central liberalism, which is a bit bigger than Republicanism. 70’s Democrat party. Then you have socialism. Then you have fascism, which is a cooperative of big government and industry to control the people. Then you have communism, where the government controls all.
At the time monarchs did not hold absolute power, but instead had ultimate power, i.e. the assemblies could suggest policies to them but the monarchs always had the last word.
It wasn't about individualism vs. collectivism. Given the number of people in a nation then, and especially now, individuals need to organize into collectives in order to get meaningful things done; and by 'collectives' I don't mean just communes but corporations, fraternal organizations, etc. Also, nations depend on individual initiative to innovate and compete with other nations; hopefully more by technological improvements and trade rather than war.
The rightwingers that supported the continuation of the monarchy did it for many reasons. Now it is popular for cynics to say "Democracy is the worst political system except for all the rest." The cynical rightwingers then would have said "Monarchy is the worst political system except for all the rest." One of the reasons they preferred monarchy is that they felt it was more honest. They believed that a true democracy would be mob rule, but that in actuality democracy would end up being rule by the elites. These elites might be able to control things from the shadows. At least with a monarch you knew who was ultimately in charge and could hold him accountable and even dethrone him if he went too far off the reservation.
Besides supporting monarchy as the best of a bad set of alternatives, rightwingers supported tradition in general, high art over mass culture, religion over humanism, duty and responsibility over license, etc.
Our country's forefathers were liberals. We call them 'classical liberals' and pretend that 'classical liberal' back then translates to 'conservative' now, but that's not really the case. For a time libertarians and conservatives were on the same page because of the US's major adversaries. The Russian and Chinese monarchies were replaced, not by Soviet and Maoist monarchies, but by tyrannies which no old school rightwinger would support. To them the state and church should never be one. The Soviets and Maoists united the 'church' of Marxism with their tyrannical states and created nightmarish systems that both true liberals and true conservatives abhor.
As far as anarchy goes, yes libertarianism is on a spectrum that leads to minarchism and then anarcho-capitalism. But on the left most true Marxists believe that the state will ultimately fall and socialism will give way to anarcho-syndicalism. The difference will be that anarcho-capitalists will support private property ownership and anarcho-syndicalists will support either group ownership or something like the group is leasing whatever property they need while they need it. In either case, since peaceful anarchy is a pipe dream these are both utopian fantasies.
Russell Kirk, who was the definition of a traditional conservative, believed strongly that there was little in common between conservatives and libertarians and the attempts that people like Buckley were making in his time to try to weld the two together was never going to work. We can see this with the Tea Party which was started by traditional conservatives and then later glommed onto by libertarians. The original message of preserving American culture by limiting immigration and running government responsibly within its budget, was replaced by reckless calls for tax cutting and naive free market utopianism that turned off most people.
Trump was successful as a candidate because he ran as a populist. Unfortunately, like Reagan before him, he started governing like a libertarian/neocon when the Deep State elites moved in. So immigration control was put on the backburner behind tax cuts which led to spiraling deficits. Trump's original populism was much closer to traditional conservatism than libertarianism. Throughout his presidency libertarian think tanks like The Cato Institute and AEI condemned his hikes in tariffs and renegotiations of trade pacts. They were all in for the TPP while Trump was cancelling it.
In the end it appears the original rightwingers were correct. We decided to opt for democracy rather than monarchy. So we had a president who wasn't the final arbiter on anything. He couldn't get a favorable congress to support his early initiatives and when he began to govern by decree (i.e. executive orders) those were shot down or held up by the courts. We couldn't hold Trump to task for failing to complete the wall or end H-1b.
Instead we had a weird combination of mob rule (true democracy) in places like Portland and Minneapolis, and we had rule by elites (degenerate democracy) nationwide. It's what some on the right call 'anarcho-tyranny'. The Deep State elites use the fear of anarchy to control the middle class. They support the anarchy and then wait for the responsible voters to demand more government in order to protect them from the anarchy, e.g. DHS, TSA, gun control, etc.
Most conservatives would agree with libertarians that government should only be as big as necessary, but some on the right have resigned themselves to what appears to be a foregone conclusion that governments will always be large. They would rather have a government that supports human beings as they are rather than human beings as some utopian idealist believes they ought to be. Better to have a government that demands that transgenderism be defined as a mental disorder rather than the progressive notion of transgenderism needing to be glorified, or the naïve libertarian notion that it be merely tolerated and allowed to be criticized. We can see what happened when we gave into the original demands of the gay lobby that their perversions be merely tolerated. That didn't end well, and is going to get worse when religious institutions are forced to either glorify homosexuality or be sued into oblivion.
Right now I can't say that I am a monarchist or neo-monarchist, but I do tend to agree with their critique of the current situation. There is something called the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" which claims that all sufficiently large and sophisticated populations will be ruled by a small group of elites, regardless of whatever the window dressing looks like. It really does appear that we have been ruled by a group of elites that are being constantly popped out of places like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, etc. They appear to be smart enough to realize we need some level of capitalism to generate sufficient wealth to support all the pervs and layabouts lolling about on the safety net. Some are arguing for a bit less regulation and taxes (RINOs) and some are arguing for more regulation and taxes (DEMs) but they both agree that the mass of the US population are rubes that can't be expected to know what is best for us. We are getting bread, circuses, and the 'freedom' to 'vote' and we are expected to get in line and thank them for their service.
“...they are tech-savvy and envious of the freedoms they recognize in the West...”
Now on the way out, due to woke-ism.
It would take decades for the US to be even comparable to the Iranian theocrazy. They’ve made a good start, but the Iranians, Norks, and the PRC are way, way ahead in the oppression department. They may never catch up, if the MAGA movement has anything to say about it.
Here's the good new on that front:
The reason colleges and Universities shout down conservatives speakers is they know our side's logic can undo the BS they feed to the young EVERY DAY IN EVERY CLASS ON CAMPUS. It's the same with twitter, CNN, the MSM... they want to silence us BECAUSE our message is powerful.
Half the country is traditional conservative... 99% of newspapers are liberal, 99+ percent of Hollywood movies are liberal, NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, PBS are liberal... twitter is liberal, Facebook is liberal, Youtube is liberal... Half of FOXNews is liberal.
And yet, half the American people are still conservative.
What does that say? It says our message is so much stronger that it can survive liberal cultural onslaught...
We can win this one..
Funding the IMF to the tune of trillions will give the mullahcracy a quick fix. Thanks nickcarraway.
We must win. We will.
American cash delivered on pallets.
Now there’s a stimulus program.
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Still waiting on my $600. If it comes at all, I want it delivered to my door on a pallet.
>But on the left most true Marxists believe that the state will ultimately fall and socialism will give way to anarcho-syndicalism.
I’ve speculated that Marx and Engles put that bit about the State “withering away” to try to curry support from gullible anarchists. As Olog-hai said, when a state be comes as powerful as Marx’s “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, it naturally prevents itself from ceasing to exist, or “withering away”. What do you think?
The really odd thing is that if Marxists truly believe in Historical Materialism and that communism is absolutely inevitable, then why do they advocate and scheme for it to happen? It would be as if when scientists discovered that the sun was powered by nuclear fusion they decided they had to send a rocket to the sun to make sure that it continued to fuse.
One of the arguments that Marxists use to explain why the Soviet Union and Maoist China ultimately failed is because they pushed too quickly. The were feudalistic agrarian cultures that skipped over capitalism and went straight to socialism.
Whether or not this is the case, it seems very hypocritical for them to use this argument to claim Marxisms' prior failures, but then continue to push for communism to come sooner rather than as history would "naturally" determine.
The Marxists now love to use the term "late capitalism". They are in William F. Buckley's words trying to "immanentize the eschaton". The only silver lining is that when they push too fast there is a reaction because the frog finally feels the heat and jumps out of the pot.
Let's hope a critical mass of the US population feels the heat from AOC's Marxist nonsense before it is too late.
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